Quick recap of March 3 meeting and next steps

Chris reiterated why the group should pursue the Madison school redistricting question (in the short term) and the long-term case study of providing quality education in Madison and education as a point of leverage for civic engagement more generally...

• school age population growing in size and diversity
• $8.5 million tax request; losing funding
• second school on Leopold site proposed, some school closings originally proposed
• neighborhood opposition: can’t close existing schools but build a new one too
• Ruth Robarts opposition: is new Leopold school too big, too concentrated, “racial warehousing” ?
• school board race happening on north side

Will offered some tentative research questions:

• What are the patterns of issue-based information flow in the community?
• How does this flow occur within and between levels of community organizations and individuals (both connected and disconnected)?
• How does media coverage/usage inform this flow?
• What type of information is carried in the flow?
• How does the flow shape the issue?
• How does issue-based information motivate (or not) individuals to engage in issue?

Pieces of this project that people want to claim?

• History of the issue (news search, school board minutes and reports) history of school segregation and desegregation in Madison
• History of demographic transition and edge growth in Madison
• Minority media (Madison Times, local minority radio, La Communidad) representation of these issues
• Mainstream media (Cap Times, WSJ, mainstream news radio) representation of these issues
• Small grassroots stakeholders ; parent-teacher organizations; churches; neighborhood associations.
• List of all the individual, organizational, and media outlet actors, especially “influentials” but not forgetting the “disengaged”
• Is there a digital divide in some of this information flow? blog, candidate web sites, web versions of mainstream and minority media, web site of school district
• Explore the weblog -- who are creators, who are participants, who is primary intended audience or what is primary intended effect?
• Mapping interactions between independent/minority/mainstream media (cross-references, dialogue, origin of stories)
• Local political actors (city council reps) -- what are they hearing?
• Mapping other ethnic/demographic/class divides in the city?
• Field interviews / baseline interviews of key actors? Quickly identify and try to find out how different key actors categorize each other with initial interviews. (eg. snowball method)
• Start attending school board meetings, PTA meetings, etc.

For next steps, folks who have the time and the inclination right now need to claim a piece of this puzzle, before our next meeting. I think the easiest way to do this is to post to the weblog with a description of what you'd like to do and your timetable for doing it; people who want to team up on particular aspects or who want to raise questions/concerns can chime in on the comments to each of these posts.